Industrial plants around the world can include commonly unattended premises such as substations, emergency shelters and process interface buildings (PIBs), which house important equipment and circuitry to monitor and control processes. The equipment in these premises can be diverse and used for different purposes, such as information technology (IT), process control, process instrumentation, heating ventilation & air conditioning (HVAC), lighting and plumbing. Because these premises are usually unattended and they can house important equipment, reliable physical security mechanism may be needed that can control, monitor and track personnel access to these premises based on their job role description and authority. For example, a process control engineer's access to an industrial plant may be controlled or monitored to ensure safe operations of the plant. In some cases, a “tracking” mechanism can also be performed thus establishing or supporting a forensic platform to conduct incident investigations.
The identification of authorized individuals and subsequent allowance or rejection of access can be executed in various ways along with multiple layers of protection. In some cases, there is also a need to track and record access to particular areas of a PIB for auditing, compliance and forensics purposes. Having reliable, auditable physical security measures and an accurate record of PIB area access can improve industrial plant safety and the compliance rate for security policy. They can also establish a forensic platform for incident investigation and handling.